Week 3 Highlights

What do you hear?

ART:
Our ears tell us many things about our environment. When we quiet ourselves, close our eyes and listen, what sounds can we hear? Maybe the wind blowing leaves in the trees, an insect buzzing by, a distant conversation, an airplane overhead, our breathing, our heart beating...

We used our ears to play listening games this week, and tried to imagine what we heard. From a recorded track, we heard rain and thunder, birds, farm animals, dinosaurs, crickets, drums, pianos, and violins. We also made sounds for others to guess, and recorded and listened to ourselves singing and playing instruments!

We listened to beautiful piano music in Debussy's La Mer, floated scarves around as we danced like water, and painted water flowing fast and slow, swirling around, and bubbling up.

 

Sometimes we drew or painted other sounds we heard. During one painting session, students began experimenting with mixing colors. "What will happen if I mix red with yellow?" Soon many children became excited to try this exploration, and engaged with classmates to find out what they were mixing! This inspired a second color mixing project, where students chose a paint color to cover their hands with, and then invited a friend with different colored hands to rub their hands together to see what would happen.

Explorations are such joy!

- Teacher Sonja

SCIENCE:
This week we continued to talk & learn about ourselves, our senses and how we use our senses all the time. We talked about listening and hearing, seeing, and touching.

(We talked about being gentle to babies. Amanda is a new big sister and she wanted to tell the class how to be soft when playing with babies because they are small.) Our conversations about bodies were interesting because a lot of kids have younger siblings. They started talking about their sibling's bodies. They wanted to share information about the babies they know instead of talking about themselves and their own bodies.

"They cry loud"
"When I use to be a baby I would cry."
"They cant walk yet."
"Look I have a baby in my tummy."
"Babies want to be carried!"
"My baby sister is small."
"The baby comes out of a tummy at the doctors."
"My brother."
"There are babies at our school too, they go on the other gate."

It is amazing how considerate our students are. Many children wanted to tell us about the babies in their lives.

GARDENING:
We learned about seeds and the growth (turning into a flower). We pretended we were seeds that grew into giant trees! We talked about fruit and bees, bugs and creatures that live under the ground. Next week we could talk more about bees, worms and bugs. Students were interested in the pollination and composting process. It would be wonderful to bring worms into the water table someday soon. Teaching the connection between fruit and seeds as they do have an understanding on what a plants need to grow-water, soil and sun. By Monday we will be able to see growth in our class garden bed. Seedlings are sprouting!! This will be exciting to observe.

NATURE HIKES:
We went on a few nature hikes. Students observed that there were different textures on the trees. The leaves were different colors and the sand at the park felt different from the sand at our school. We found shapes in nature. We found new rocks to add to our rock collection. Students's interests were:

- Sorting rocks
- building houses
- pulling logs and tree branches
- asking friends for help and problem solving. "This is too heavy, Hey can you help me?"
- formulating ideas for the outdoor classroom. Some ideas students had: "more rocks, a new garden, bird food for the feeders, a table to color on, jump on a big pile of dirt."
- the students heard airplanes and trains.
- students noticed the circle shape. The round tennis ball is a circle. The sun in a circle. The rock is a circle. Our eyes have circles. There are tiny circles on this leaf.

One more note! Thank you to all the incredible parents that have spent so much time in the classrooms helping out!! It's such a treat to have parents involved. We have an awesome group of families! Thanks again.
  
-Teacher Can
can.peregrine@gmail.com